


The Turning Point Comes in the Empty Tomb of a Child Soldier

by AntagonizedPenguin



Series: How Best to Use a Sword [16]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood, Literal and Metaphoric, Plots, Spiders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 06:34:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8613034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntagonizedPenguin/pseuds/AntagonizedPenguin
Summary: In the bowels of a mountain, the god comes to speak with the spider.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This one was a lot of fun to write, and then I realized I'd written something for this series that doesn't feature any sort of sex or relationship. I've slipped into the pit of plot, I fear.

The spider was hesitant as it dropped from the ceiling, lit by a beam of falling sunlight from a break in the rock face. Klaus watched it get lower and lower until it was just above his arm. When it touched him, the spider’s colouring started to change, from the light brown of the rocks to the paler colour of Klaus’s bare arm. Slowly it skittered down him, from his forearm to his hand, off onto the blackened ground where it changed colours to match. 

Watching it, Klaus wondered if it would turn red as well when it reached the pool of blood slowly spreading out from where he was sitting. But the spider stopped at the edge of the pool and moved back, back up Klaus’s arm, and started spinning a web immediately. 

Maybe it knew that the blood would attract insects. Maybe it knew that Klaus wasn’t going to be moving from here. 

He had healed the wound that had been leaking all that blood, a painful, forceful magic that he wouldn’t have wished on another. Klaus didn’t think he’d lost enough blood to kill him, nor was he concerned that those who’d chased him into the bowels of this mountain would find him to finish what they’d started. He’d set up enough traps as he fled to ensure that, and every so often Klaus could hear an explosion, a collapse, a scream. They were growing fewer in number, and outside the mountain Klaus could feel magic being cast, spells of warding and protection. To keep him in here until he starved to death. 

Maybe the spider would bite him later, just as a precaution against its work being destroyed. But even if it didn’t, Klaus would die in here soon enough. Maybe, another time, in another place, he might have been okay. But here, and now, he was too tired, too drained, too injured, too old to do anything. 

Seventy years was a long time to fight the same war. 

He’d been so young when it had started—in fact, if he was to be pedantic, it had started before he was born. Too many people considered that a different war, though, a war that had ended at Thunderfall, heralding in a newer, more destructive conflict. One that Klaus didn’t think would end until one side had been completely annihilated. But it was the same war, it had always been the same war. Ten years old at Thunderfall and eleven just a few months later when the Web had suddenly been torn apart and the face of magic in the world had changed. The connection Klaus had drawn between the two events had always been dismissed as childish fantasy by people in power, and deemed unimportant by people who believed him. 

It mattered, though. Maybe it didn’t change anything or give any sort of solution to the conflict, but it mattered to Klaus that the war he was fighting now was the same war he’d been raised in. It mattered that Aaron had disappeared with his friend right before it had happened. The most gifted magic-user of his generation gone, and then the Web itself collapsed a week later. It mattered, in some vague, undefinable way. It mattered.

It mattered, because Klaus thought that maybe, if he knew the part of the story that was missing, if that gap could just be filled in, maybe then the entire war, his entire life, hadn’t been totally senseless. 

He’d never thought to live this long. They didn’t when he was little. People who used the Web lived to be twenty, maybe thirty if they were careful. Now, that wasn’t true anymore. The Web had been broken into pieces, neutered. The chaos that had caused was nothing compared to the revolution that had happened after people started to realize how much safer magic was now—now almost everyone born with the talent was able to be safely trained in it, instead of just those three in ten who weren’t killed instantly by it. Maybe they were weaker, but there were so many more of them, an army vastly more powerful than it had been before.

Which was a good thing, since that was when gods and humans had mutually decided to destroy one another. 

Klaus sighed, watching the spider on his arm craft the outline of its web. “I don’t know why you bother.” He said to it. “It’s futile in the end. Twenty years or seventy, you’ll die like the rest of us.”

The spider didn’t answer, just kept working. 

“You’re just like me.” Klaus snorted. “Spend your life ignoring other people telling you retire. You’re just too damn important to stop—or maybe you’re just too damn scared to do anything other than toil away. Because then you’d be admitting that the world really doesn’t need you anymore—and maybe it never did.” 

A prodigy, a genius. He’d practically reinvented magic after the Web had broken. There were battles that had only been won because he’d been there, and a few dead gods who could attest his power. And for all that, the war was still going on, and nobody knew why, and Klaus was going to die in a mountain where nobody would find his body. 

“I could kill you, you know.” Klaus sighed. “And you must understand that at least on some level. But you’re still there, just…working.”

“You won’t kill it, though.” A voice said, and Klaus found he didn’t have the energy to look up more than slowly. A young man was coming into the cavern, following the trail of blood Klaus had left behind. He was wan and tan, and he looked familiar. “That’s what’s always made you different from them, isn’t it?”

He had gotten past all of Klaus’s traps and spells without a ripple or a mark on him. “And I’m to pretend that you’re not one of ‘them?’” He asked, smiling. “No need to pretend. You heard that I was dying and wanted to do it yourself, is that it? Really get that last word in?”

“What I heard was that the greatest general on the resistant side was running with a loyalist army in these mountains.” The god said, crouching down in front of Klaus. “And then when I get here, he’s dying. You’ve gotten old, Klaus.”

Klaus blinked, took a good long look at the man, taking in his features. “You disappeared.” He said after a moment. “After Thunderfall. I’d assumed you died.” Lots of people had disappeared after Thunderfall. Common practice was to assume they’d died. 

Lord Matchstick, they’d used to call him in the Crab Company. Klaus had never really known why, but he’d been young and desperate for everyone to know that he was one of them, so he’d gone along with it as well. And now he realized that he’d never learned the god’s real name. 

“You were just a little boy.” Lord Matchstick said with a shake of his head. “You never should have been there.”

“I survived it.” Klaus countered. “It’s the people who died who never should have been there.”

Lord Matchstick smiled sadly. “Yes, you’re right about that. It should never have happened.”

“But it did.”

“But it did.” The god agreed, sitting now. “What were you doing with the loyalists? I haven’t been watching you, but from what I’ve heard I can’t believe you turned traitor.” 

Despite himself, Klaus gave the god a smile. At least, he figured, he wouldn’t be alone when he died, now. Maybe it was somehow fitting that it would be this person, of all people to sit here and watch him go. “Do you know the name of this spider here?” He asked.

“I don’t.” Lord Matchstick admitted.

“In this area they call it a _svet’keit yetztma._ ” 

The god smiled at that, but it was rueful and he shook his head. “I’ve always thought Har’chezt was too melodramatic a language, honestly, and I don’t understand why people persist in clinging to its lexicon. ‘Camouflage spider’ is so much more straightforward.” 

“Perhaps, though it’s a tad boring.” Klaus watched the spider move around. “It changes colours in order to keep itself hidden from predators. They’re very good at looking like other kinds of spiders as well.”

“So the other spiders will think it’s one of their own and not attack it.”

“Yes, but that’s not the only reason.” Klaus nodded. “It will also mimic less dangerous spiders in order to draw in large prey like birds and then it will bite them.” He smiled again at the god. “It’s a very venomous spider.” 

“No doubt.” Lord Matchstick seemed to be finding this amusing. “And which bird were you after, then?”

Klaus shrugged one shoulder. “Who says I was? The spider kills birds or rats on occasion, but they aren’t its only prey.”

Lord Matchstick was quiet for a moment, looking at the spider. He moved his eyes up to Klaus. “Clearly you want me to ask what the other prey is.” 

“Other spiders.” Klaus smiled one more time. “Loyalists make me angry because they don’t understand what this war is about. They think it’s a conflict between humans who want to rid themselves of gods and humans who don’t.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No. It’s a conflict between humans who want to survive and gods who want to kill them. The only ones who benefit from us fighting each other are your lot.”

Lord Matchstick folded his hands in front of him, nodded in thought. “The other spiders saw through your disguise, though.” He said, nodding at the pool of blood. 

“They did.” Klaus agreed. “I’m older than I thought.” 

“I didn’t come here to watch you die, Klaus.”

“So I’ve guessed.” And if he was going to wait for Klaus to ask why he was here, then he was going to end up watching Klaus die after all. 

The silence stretched on for a moment before Lord Matchstick realized that Klaus wasn’t playing that game. Then he laughed a little. “I came to ask you a question. What if there were three sides, instead of those two?” 

“There aren’t.” Klaus shook his head. “And I’m not interested in changing that. If you want to pick a fight with your friends, do it on your own time.” It wouldn’t have been the first time it had happened, but usually those little rebellions fizzled out pretty quickly. 

“Humans can’t win this war, Klaus.” The god said to him, sadly. “They need help.”

“From you?”

“From you.”

“I’m human.”

Lord Matchstick shrugged. “I know. And you should value that. But you know as well as anyone that in order to win wars, we need to sacrifice things we value.”

Klaus scoffed. “And what are you going to sacrifice, boy?” It didn’t feel as strange as he’d thought, infantilizing someone who had been an adult in Klaus’s childhood. 

But as soon as he thought that, Klaus looked into the eyes of the god and saw age that was unfathomable. “Everything.” 

Chilled to his core and feeling the entire weight of this mountain on his soul, Klaus tried not to shrink back from that. “Two people isn’t an army.”

“You’re only the first.”

“I’m dying.” Klaus said. “Even if you take me out of here, I’m old and tired.”

“I can fix that.” 

“I can’t become like you.” Klaus said, shaking his head. “I’ve spent my whole life fighting your kind. I won’t become one of you.”

“No.” Lord Matchstick shook his head. “You won’t. You’ll become something better.” 

“What is your plan, then?” Klaus asked, already feeling even more tired. “You must have one.”

“I plan to end the war. I plan to give the humans what they need to kill the rest of my kind. I plan to take this world away from the gods and give it to your people.” 

Klaus’s first thought was that it wasn’t Lord Matchstick’s world to give to anyone or take from anyone. But he didn’t say that. “And why should you want that?” 

“Because my people don’t deserve it anymore.” The god looked down at the spider and the near-completed web. “Maybe they never did.” 

There was something deeper to that, a sadness that Klaus didn’t feel right prodding. Humans weren’t the only ones who could experience loss, it seemed. “Do you have allies?” He asked. “Among the gods?”

“Not one that would support me in this, no.”

Klaus nodded. “And among the humans? Who else have you approached?”

“Just you, so far.” 

Klaus snorted, shook his head. “You’re going to be destroyed.”

“Maybe, but I don’t need to tell you that you’re on the brink of extinction. Two generations at most, before you’re wiped out. If nothing is done, anyway.”

Klaus didn’t agree with that, at least not that they had so little time. But the god wasn’t entirely wrong. He could feel his colour starting to change. 

Regretfully, Klaus reached down and scooped up the edges of the web, plucking it from his arm and moving it aside. The spider panicked and skittered up the threads to get to the threat, but Klaus deposited the web a foot away and instead of attacking the spider fled, changing to a shadowed black as it moved into a little alcove. 

He looked up at Lord Matchstick and nodded, determination settling on him. “Then we shall have to do something, won’t we?” 

He could do something. He could end the war. He could make it mean something, even if it didn’t. And if he couldn’t, if he was wrong and this was a waste of time, and nothing meant anything and it was all futile, then…

 _Svet’keit yetztma_ were very venomous spiders.


End file.
